Free The Velvet Rage by Alan Downs Page A

near the campus.
    Michael remembered the first night that he began to feel something strangely attracting him to Phillip. The four of them returned to Phillip’s apartment from a night out on the town. Behind the apartment was a pond, and Phillip suggested that they all go skinny-dipping. In a flash, they were all out on the lawn, stripping in the moonlight. Michael noticed the muscular curves of Phillip’s body and the glistening of the small, blond hairs that covered most of his athletic torso. He also caught the sense that Phillip was noticing him, too. In the water they plunged, swimming, laughing, and playing. Michael remembers the feeling of arousal that haunted him that night, and the difficulty he had concealing his underwater erection.
    As the months went by, Michael and Phillip began going out without their girlfriends in tow. What was once a delightfully unexpected encounter became a weekend ritual. The two would go out to a local bar and drink until they were both thoroughly drunk and then stumble back to Michael’s place on the edge of campus. Drunk and pretending to not know what they were doing, the evening would culminate with the two men naked in bed making out. This ritual continued throughout their junior year. Michael recalls that year with great fondness and tells of
how completely devoted he became to Phillip. He didn’t think of either one of them as being gay, and yet he knew that he was completely taken with Phillip.
    One night late in August before their senior year, Michael got a call from an old friend from high school who was obviously drunk. He asked Michael flat out if he was a homosexual. Phillip had been telling everyone around town that Michael had tried to seduce him, but Phillip had pushed him away and told him to go screw himself.
    Now a strapping man in his forties, Michael shifted in his chair across from me and wept for several minutes. “I didn’t know what to do. I just hung up the phone and thought I would die. I never spoke to Phillip again.”
    Michael told me of how he had replayed in his memory time and again how Phillip had caressed him, kissed him gently, and how the two of them often had half a dozen orgasms before dawn. Over and over again he scrutinized his memories, looking for any sign that Phillip had been an unwilling party to this or that his feelings for Phillip had been on false premises. There was nothing he could point to—he was sure that the feelings were mutual and that Phillip had been as much an initiator as he.
    After this traumatic college experience, Michael had never been able to trust a lover again. He had great friends that he trusted completely, he said, but the minute he slept with a man, the suspicions raged. Michael desperately wanted a loving, long-term relationship but had come to believe that he was incapable of sustaining one. It was clear that his experience with Phillip, a man who so devilishly betrayed him some two decades earlier, stood in his way.
    Like it was for both Gore Vidal and Michael, those early relationships created unprecedented emotional trauma that they
subsequently carried into every succeeding relationship. For Vidal it was the young beauty who abandoned him through death, and for Michael it was the strong, athletic man who betrayed and publicly belittled him. Very different experiences, yet both affected these men for many years afterwards.
    In this first stage of being a gay man, we are not equipped to have a healthy intimate relationship. Our own internal conflicts prevent us from gaining the emotional clarity needed to maintain a safe and satisfying bond. The situation compounds when two men, both overwhelmed with shame, come together in an intense and explosive expression of passion. What produces arguably the most erotic experiences of a gay man’s life also takes him to the lowest place he is likely to know.
    Many years ago in California, I treated Sean, a bright, very handsome young man